OT: What has been your wisest stock purchase/sale

The Tesla thread got me wondering, what has been your wisest stock investment move? Maybe you got in early or sold at just the right time. Your chance to brag about how wise (or lucky) you were.

For me, many years back (2013 I think) I had a 401k that I needed to rollover and I designated about $30k of the total to put into a couple individual stocks. I spent about half on Google and about the other half on Apple. I was a careful investor and had done my due diligence on both companies. Now, both of those have obviously done very well, and the Apple move definitely made the most money for any single investment.

But, after buying those two stocks, I still had $1,800 left over. On a whim I decided to put that toward Tesla. I had not researched their financials or forecasts. Of course they were all over the news on the new Model S that I think they had just started delivering. Split adjusted I got in at $30/share. That stock thus far has had about 4-5x the growth over my Apple investment. Today the news is they are planning another stock split.

So Apple was my wisest move, and Tesla was my luckiest move.

OG

My hometown happens to be the hometown of Cummins Engine Company. A lot of family and friends have worked there over the years but I never did.

I did however take some savvy advise from a family member when I was younger and used part of my enlistment bonus when I joined the Army and bought $2000 worth of stock at around $3.50 per....

While not extremely big money it is over $250 per now and did have a couple of splits on the way. It will definitely help come retirement time.

My best was a penny stock - literally bought $50 worth at 1.1 cents per share (about 4600 shares). They were in some land management negotiations with Walmart that if it went through would have been a big boon, but that fell through and the stock dropped to 0.001 cents.


But a year later after considering that a loss of $50, they took on another contract and the stock rose to $35 per share. Nice little gain of $160,000 - and I did sell it off before they lost that contract and went back to worthless.

Back when Musk bought Solar City, the market "pundits" trashed him for doing it because "solar is dead", so Tesla stock tanked. I was doing a BUNCH of work for the Tesla Gigafactory battery plant they were building near Reno and I knew that Tesla was not really in the "car" business, they are in the BATTERY business and the cars are just a way of using their batteries. So to me, owning a solar company that can sell "free" charging for Tesla batteries was a win-win. So I took the "mad money" in my 401k money market account and bought Tesla stock at what would be a split adjusted price of $40/share. As of last year when it was over $1200 I was officially a millionaire, but now I'm a little short of that again. Still, at over $1k/share today, I'm not complaining...

Because of that success, I took the last little bit of that money market cash that was doing nothing, and bought a few shares of Nikola Motors, who are looking to make electric delivery trucks. I bought that at $12, last month it dropped to $6.60, so I figured that was a bust, but now it's climbing again back toward 12, so maybe all is not lost.

In around 2012 , my company was going gangbusters doing projects for gold mines in Nevada and Arizona, so I bought into a mutual fund that was supposed to be invested into gold mining companies and equipment companies supporting them. A year later I lost 75% of that investment and have still not seen it recover beyond 50%. I would have thought that with all of the uncertainty in the world lately we would have seen that increase in value, but nope.

My best buy was buying 1/3 of Delta Computer Systems.
Now I own 1/2. We bought out one of the partners in 1992.
Those of you that run your own business are doing the right thing. It isn't easy but the rewards can be huge if you do it right.
Investing in yourself is usually a good idea.

My best so far has been Tesla. Bought it at $26/share. Then it split doubling, and now it may split again. Only wish I had bought more.